Well, I bit the bullet and started work on th...

April 11, 2003 by Adam in NWN1

Well, I bit the bullet and started work on the castle. I dusted off Danmar's unfinished castle tiles and integrated them with the mountain tileset. All the relevant tiles have been added to the .SET and .ITP files. I created two new tiles to allow the castle wall to merge with the mountainside. I also made the doors in the tower tiles workable.

Unfortunately, that's just the easy part. I have two major tiles I need to create before the set is actually workable: a doorway out from the castle wall and a main castle gate. The doorway in the castle wall is critical, as there's no external way to get from the courtyard to the wall. So, I'll put in a stairway in the towers to take care of that. The main castle door is tougher - I need to decide if it'll be like the Guardhouse tile in the official set (e.g. a gate people can pass through, but not over), or more like the GoodCastle entrance, which is a normal door. I really like the idea of a big gate, but the downside is that bridges aren't allowed - no walking over and under. I'll probably think about it today and do the modeling this weekend.

Oh - I messed around with walkmeshes and pathfinding for the castle tileset for about an hour yesterday. The same problems continued. I could pathfind down the ramp, but not up. I've given up on the ramp and I'm now resigned to doorways in the tower.

As for the module itself, I scripted, but haven't tested, the enemy catapult AI. Basically, if you wander in unprepared, bring a really big umbrella.