I'm back! It was a very long but productiv...

June 22, 2007 by Adam in NWN2

I'm back!

It was a very long but productive vacation. My quiet time was typically spent fiddling with my computer, in between swimming with the kids, exploring caves, and generally enjoying sunny central Oregon.

In particular the High Seas game got a ton of attention. The worldmap GUI lets you see nearby ships, whether they hate you or not, special ships with unique captains and treasure, and trading tips. Ship to ship combat now mostly works, minus some visual effects that I implemented this morning while we were packing. Boarding actions work nicely and are pretty epic in scope if you haven't taken out the crew with weapons first. I love the named captains and the special treasures you can find.

I also spent some time working on the Chronomancer quest. It was horribly broken and I carefully went through piece by piece until it mostly worked. There's still some polish to do, but I think you can complete all of the major quests at this point.

There are side quests that are unfinished and some cutscenes and a card game quest that I know are broken. Still, having a week away from distractions was exactly what I needed to get things ready to get to testers. I fixed some really weird bugs in the last week. One of my favorites was the new system where you see your ship waiting for you at the docks. Initially it was a massive werewolf statue, which was creepy yet somehow appropriate. The second bug involved ships suddenly moving about on the world map partially submerged. It turns out that polymorphed creatures lose their scaling after a module reload. Weird. I ended up rescaling the ship models outside of the game and it turned out okay.

I'm going to try and put together a movie of the high seas area once I fix the last of the visual effects. It's nice to be back.