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Custom Content is still a major hassle

Dejà vu... I had to cry for help again at the Bioboards and seeing that the NWN2 CC boards are much less frequented than the NWN1 CC boards, I'm not too optimistic.
I'm still feeling bad about "using" Ben for all the NWN1 hak fixing, and in the end dropping the whole thing, but now it looks like I'm in need of such a selfless person again, because I'm getting overwhelmed.

My momentary problem is illustrated in this thread on the Bioboards, but I see a lot more coming soon, given that I already think about dropping one major hak compilation in favor of a custom one.
I could slap myself for starting without a plan again, but for me building is something intuitive like drawing, not a logical, planned thing like architecture. Now I figured I used the wrong paints and it's too late to save the picture :)

Well, I don't want to sound too pessimistic, I think rebuilding what I've done so far wouldn't take as much time as starting a new area from scratch, but it's certainly annoying. Who knows, maybe there's even a way to safe the whole thing. I'd rather know if the City Hak I used can actually be made SoZ-compatible at all, since I'd never start building again without it, the quality of those placeables is just too good compared to the standard NWN2 stuff.

First steps

I've started rebuilding the city with the medieval city hak now. To my great delight the hak did not break too much, although there were some minor conflicts with 3C, and even installing the Storm of Zehir expansion didn't break it all.
Yesterday I borrowed a day/night cycle from lowfatpretzels, it's a very dark and gritty one and fills the city with a light similar to being close to a thunderstorm. Even though I'd never use it as a standard, I like the feel of it - you can almost feel and smell the thick air and expect a thunder coming anytime. So even though I don't really have much to show, I made some screens with the buildings I already placed. I'm not satisfied with the basic layout anymore, but spent too much time working on this to start over again. From now on I'll improvise - this is far from being "clean, logical" building. Actually it's just a great mess, but we'll see... :)

A view from the docks

From the city wall down to the patrician quarter


The patrician quarter


Way to the harbor



View from Rungoldt's entrance

(Re-) Building a city

Yeah, that's right. My first attempt wasn't satisfying enough for me, so I plan to start over and do it right this time. The basic layout with the canals is still nice and I plan to keep it, but I ran into a lack of proper buildings for what I tried to achieve. There's the slum buildings on the screenshots (last post) that are kinda cool, but they are a.) not tintable in the way I need them (the wooden parts can't be changed), and b.) don't fit in with the standard NWN2 row houses. But I need row houses, and the fix is: Get a replacement for the row houses, haha.
Fortunately, there is exactly the right hak available at the vault, the absolutely awesome, 100% casa-vision-compatible City hak that includes pretty much everything NWN2 doesn't include: Realistic city houses, towers, walls, bridges that don't look like plastic (I already replaced the one in that old screenshot by a self-built stone bridge) and a lot of other things that just look a tad better than the standards. Maybe I should mention that most of the content is taken from Oblivion (sigh).
But, and yeah, there's also that HUGE "but" we all know too well from NWN1: hak incompatibilities. 2da rows. ( *include 5 minutes of cursing in here* ). So what I'm doing right now again is trying to fix 2das to get the city hak and 3C to work together, and I'm sure the next step will be getting 3C and various other stuff to work with Storm of Zehir content etc. etc.
If I was safe with custom content, I'd first drop 3C completely (btw, 3C is some sort of CEP for NWN2 - the author would immediately say it isn't, but for a naive builder like me it is exactly that) and make my own collection, but that's way too much work. So here I am again doing all that stuff I never wanted to do, and that's why the next screenies might take a little longer to show up again. I'm on it.

Building a city

I think I'm making some progress. I should, because I've spent the last two nights awake and my sleeping pattern is a total mess again. The screenshots in my last post looked really ugly and plain, but now I think I have the basic idea of the layout of each quarter in my head and work slowly from one end to the next. The last three days went without much walkmesh problems, the docks finaly work and I decided the walls don't have to be walkable if they don't want to be, quite the opposite actually - walking the walls would only reveil the little optical tricks I'm trying to build in.
Anyway, my current project is the dockside quarter and the poor side of he city. I've spent two days puzzling some buildings together and I think I'm getting somewhere. The tinting of most buildings seems to be quite limited, I'm getting a different look than I originally intended, but I can't say I'm disappointed so far. Actually, I'd rather show off some screenies that might give an idea of what I'm aiming at.
On a sidenote, this area will be huge, it's 16x16 so far (which is the upper limit of what is recommended), and I'm throwing placeables in like crazy. The reason for this is that NWN2 doesn't support that many individual areas. In NWN1 I'd break the city into 4 smaller parts (as I actually did), but in NWN2 I'll have to get as much into one area as possible. From Dammendrech I know that huge city areas with thousands of placeables can be playable, however, the loading time will probably be horrible. But for a non-hostile area, I think it's okay to enforce a little coffee break. I can just hope computer systems will catch up with what I'm doing in the future. So far it runs quite smooth on my system, but I'm only 10% done yet, and my computer is not lowest end. However, the idea of players running through it on lowest graphics settings is scary... We'll see, it's too late to stop now.


The docks again, this time with water.


A different view on the two cranes. A few placeables are already scattered around, but too plain still. ;)


An alley, cramped as they shall all be.

View towards the small dockside market I'm currently working on. I'm still unsure about the bridge, and I have to change that horrible default day/night cycle.

From a different angle. I hope the small canals will give the city an unique feel.

New Beginning

I know I'm slow, very slow. And for a long time I thought building in NWN2's toolset would be just too much for me. And it is slow, much slower than in NWN1. In the old toolset a basic area layout took me a day or so, and the Runghold area as it is now took maybe a week. That means already basic lighting, some working doors, market stands and some NPCs I got excited about (see Anna).
NWN2 is much slower. I started with some interiors, as was suggested to me, and while it's certainly more clumsy than NWN1's toolset, working with tiles isn't totally new and I got used to it soon enough to lose interest and started with exteriors. The first one was a lake in the hills, the basic idea was a cave entrance under the water level a player could "dive into". Quite simple, but for a newbie like me harder than I imagined. The problem is really, with total freedom in forming the landscape the builder actually has to plan ahead, and that's something totally contrary to NWN1 where I used to start somewhere and experimented by clicking and trying wildly until I found something I liked and from where I can work further. NWN2 doesn't leave as much room for experimentation, because mistakes can easily lead to a total startover.
Anyway, during the last few months I was working through some of the basic tutorials available at the vault, and even though I'm one of those persons who hate tutorials, I recommend this to everyone. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the NWN2 toolset is essential for a newbie, another great ressource with further steps into intermediate building is NWNmaster's NWN2 Toolset Guide.
Always a source for inspiration is of course the server I used to play on all the time. Not only does it show wonderful building, it also led me to thinking what I would do different or better if I had the skill.

Fine, after this little introduction now the great (?) news, I started building again with Middleforest in mind. Of course I started with Runghold, and I can only say it's very slow and painful. After a week or so it still looks plain and like Lego in the toolset, and I admit after Five days of building there's actually not much to see, it's far from being impressive or even nice to look at. The reason, besides what I said earlier, is walkmeshes. Walkmesh, the curse of any enthusiastic builder? I can't say, I just know I can't for my life figure out the strange logic of this beast. It's simple in a plain exterior area, you have that nice grid with all the nice triangles in yellow and you can add and erase parts... so far so good. A simple bridge over a small river, all fine. But Balconies, stairs, docks, "selfmade" bridges... it's hell. Two days I was only trying to allow a PC to walk on some walls or on the docks I built, I tried walkmesh helpers, tried to figure out how walkmesh helpers work (a tutorial from Obsidian was no help in my case at all), and came to the conclusion it's just a matter of trial and error, and a lot of luck. If I give up building again, it'll be because of Walkmeshes, that's for sure.
Anyway, last but not least a few clumsy WIP screenies, just to have some screens on my blog again.


My first clumsy exterior...

Basic layout of Rungold in the toolset, not many buildings to see yet


A selfmade bridge - maybe too ambitious, I doubt I'll get the walkmesh thingie done :)


The basic docks

What's become of Middleforest?

I'm not sure how many people had really been interested in this little project of mine, but I guess I owe the few at least a short update on what has happened to it. 

However, it's not easy to put it into words. I think the main reason I stopped working on it (yes, I did) is that I got used to NWN2. Yes, I know, don't remind me about my bitching about the game, most of it is still true. There are about a thousand things I still hate about this game, but there are a few that changed my view a little. The main on the builder's side being artistic freedom where NWN1 limited me too much, and then there's the simple fact that the graphics can be nice if you know how to do it right, and I just love eye candy. The official game and the first modules and PWs I played just didn't give a hint of what can be done when the builder actually spends some time with things like light and shadows, or shows real creativity in the use of the terrain editor or placeables. Hence my impression that the game looks dull and boring. 

I was wrong, it can look awesome.. it's just a tremendous amount of work to get there.  Last but not least, for me as a player it means also that I can have a more immersive world to play in with a character that looks nicer (yes, thanks to custom content and some creativity NWN2 characters don't have to look ugly) and has much more options to advance (new classes, four classes allowed, etc. etc.). So yeah, as a player I got used to the game and don't want to miss it anymore. I miss building Middleforest, but then, why build it if I spend my playing time in NWN2? The logical solution would be rebuilding it as a NWN2 PW, and that's my dream.

But, now to the downside, I just can't get used to building in NWN2's toolset. The whole thing is such a pile of crap, it's unbelievable. Yes, it is powerful, much more powerful than the NWN1 toolset, and yes, I've done the tutorials and know how to build an area now. There are advantages, I like the dialogue and script editors in NWN2's toolset, but the rest is just an unintuitive mess. One could say, the difference between NWN1's to NWN2's toolset is like switching from the Mac to Windows, but that would be an insult for Windows, because compared to NWN2's toolset it's an awesome, stable and secure environment you can work with perfectly. 

NWN2's toolset crashes like mad, it spits out error messages like mad, your module is getting corrupted every second day, you have to micromanage all those plug ins, spend a day alone to get the GUI into an useable state. It's a science for itself to get that thing just into a working state and learn how to avoid the worst errors before you can even start being creative.

Then there's the second problem, that being the options. You have a lot of options, and that's good. You can scale, you can tint, you have uncountable ways and options to change things. But, it's in no way intuitive or easy to get there. Scaling with a simple slider? Na, you have to do it by putting numbers into a text field... you know, things like that. It's made for geeks. Assign a tlk to your mod? No, an "open file" window would be too easy, please type in the name of your tlk. Just two small examples, but examples for the unintuitive way that thing works. 

Plug ins... oh, yes there are some helpful ones, nobody can live without the famous Sin plug-in for example. But after each and every game patch you have to wait a month for all the plug-ins you use to be updated, because every toolset update breaks them... or you have to learn how to edit xml files. Sure, no problem for the average geek, but I'd just like to build and not spend my time with the pain of managing the toolset.

Another usability problem with the too many options is that it simply takes a lot of time to get something done you really didn't want to spend too much time on. A good example is the area lighting, done with the day/night cycle options. Yes, we have... um.. don't let me lie... 8(?) stages now instead of the simple day and night in NWN1's toolset. Of course that's great, you can control how your sunrise looks, how your noon, afternoon, evening hours, nightfall, midnight look, but it takes such a long time to set up just this that you have to ask yourself where to take the time for actual building.

As for building, I have to admit the terrain editor lowered my self-esteem a lot. Theoretically I can do everything I want with it. Practically, I'm never satisfied with anything I do in there, I'm playing around for 8 hours just to get the basic landscape done, look at it in game and trash the whole area because I finally discovered I totally underestimated this one brush size or overestimated the size of that river or whatever, and that before I even placed the first house into the area. I saw wonderful area building where I play, I often walk around thinking what I'd alter or do it better or different if I built it, but once in the toolset I'm getting one blackout after the next. 

To make a long story short, I think the main difference between the two toolsets is that NWN1 rewards you immediately, you start building and really make fast progress, the preview rewards you quite often enough to give you a reason to pat yourself on the shoulder.

NWN2's toolset takes very long to reward you, much more often it kicks and bites you, and sometimes you think you finally got somewhere, then try it out and notice you messed up so badly it's not worth trying to fix it anymore. It can be very frustrating, and I'm not sure f I can ever really start working seriously on a NWN2 version of Middleforest with that in mind. 

However, recently I asked Squatting Monk how our (actually his) little xp system and the other stuff we thought up together is coming along, in contrary to me he has actually made some progress with his mod. I'm not sure if it would help, but it might be a little encouragement if the systems, especially the xp system, could be modified to work with NWN2. I still think they are awesome, and I think a NWN2 version of it would help making a really unique world for those who, as sad as it is, got lost to NWN2 like me. The NWN2 side of things really lacks good RP servers and unique worlds, and I got to the point where I think this game deserves some love too. If it just wasn't so damn hard.

Anyway, that's it for the moment. To make a long story short, instead of building I'm now dreaming of building... something like that. Still trying to change that again.