I know what you think now: "A walking cat, so what?". The point is, I didn't expect it to walk. Why? Because I thought my quick and dirty, easy and painless way to bring things to life wouldn't work in NWN2 anymore. I honestly don't know why I thought that, maybe because I held NWN2's toolset in such a low regard. There's that simple little function in NWN, it's called X2_L_SPAWN_USE_AMBIENT. Just add that as a variable with Int = 1 and your creature starts bumping into things... well, and if it doesn't currently bump into something, it walks around too. There are other variations, but this is the one from Bioware's ambient system I copied and pasted maybe a thousand times in the past, to let each and every creature that couldn't run fast enough become a slave of the evil ambient emote system.
And for NWN2 I really expected I had to use paths from waypoint to waypoint for every chicken I place on a farm. You can't believe how happy I was when I placed that cat in the street and thought to myself "hey, it can't hurt to try". Started the module, ran to the cat and it walked. A miracle!
But hold on, maybe Obsidian did just some thing like: Cats just walk around by default, because nobody wants a cat standing around. So the next victims were two nobles I created an hour before:
And they do the exact same stupid things they used to do in NWN1... walk around like lunatics, bump into walls, trees, ignore each other like a married couple should. Hooray! Now I'm eager to see what other stuff from that old ambient system I can dig out again, maybe even that random interaction with placeables is still hidden somewhere?
Oh, what else is there, because everyone will obviously just think "great, there's some 2-year old news, quite impressive"... right, I placed greenery, a lot of green stuff, because green is just so vivid:
And that's it for now, thanks to the massive amount of trees my toolset is always close to crashing now, makes the work kind of slow and the cursing loud when I forgot to save again.
1 comment:
Woohoo, update! Ambiance is what I'm working on for Shadows & Silver right now, except I'm not happy with the vanilla system and want something more robust and flexible. It sucks trying to make it, though, so I'm glad to see one of us is getting progress.
As far as the trees go, isn't there a way to disable the trees in the toolset? It's been forever since I've had NWN2 installed, so I forget.
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