I had two luxurious days of not working too h...

February 25, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I had two luxurious days of not working too hard on Dark Waters. I played around with a new idea for a game called WordPlay, which is a bit like Apples-to-Apples. The tricky part is the AI, which relies on huge array that lists the best choice given different card combinations. If I have 100 adjectives and 300 nouns, that's 30,000 possible combinations. To add to the fun, I'd like to have different styles of players, such as the Paladin who looks for the literal connections (e.g. "Vile" and "Undead" go together nicely for him). For the Trickster player, he might pick "My Spleen" when faced with the adjective "Tasty".

The only way I could possibly create those connections is by turning it over to the masses to do it for me. It's still a lot of work, but perhaps some of the folks out in Internet-land would be willing to spend a few minutes each day deciding that the best match for "Buxom" is "My Animal Companion". Anyway, we'll see how that wacky idea pans out.

I have a love/hate relationship with the Lute Hero game I'm working on. I have to do some really crazy timing things in order to get the song to synchronize with the note display. I had an epiphany that I could just set the time so that the seconds and milliseconds were zero at the start of the song, which made it vastly easier to keep track of things. The wacky game now seems to work, which means I suppose I have to build an actual module around it.

This finally gets me to the state of Dark Waters and whether or not I'll be officially releasing it before the sun burns out and humanity retreats to underground caverns.

It looks like the people who were having crashing problems continue to have issues. The number is small (maybe less than 5%), but it's super annoying and I'm to the point where I'm hoping the next NWN2 patch takes care of it. The only crazy workaround I've heard might work is opening the module in the toolset and running it from there. Why that would help, I have no idea. The only other vaguely good news is that entering those crash-prone areas isn't absolutely necessary for completing the game.

I got a couple presents in my in box this morning, some more voices for a couple characters. I had a few bug reports, which I'd like to investigate, but they may belong to the "happens every once in awhile" category of bugs. I also got some reports of minor plot inconsistencies, which I'm almost happy about. It's nice things have gotten to that point for a change.

So, I'm thinking that I can put together at least one more build, but unless there's something really serious after that, I'd like to go live. After six months debugging and polishing, it feels pretty darn' ready.