I got the ghost ship into High Seas

March 03, 2006 by Adam in NWN2

I got the ghost ship into High Seas. It's the cute and little version, which I suppose makes it hard to strike fear into the hearts of mortals. I have plans for a big version too, so that people can ooh and aah over it in all it's haunted glory.

I was a little inspired by Raz's latest work and did some preliminary fiddling with one of his other models. I'm not sure I'm brave enough to texture the whole thing, but I had a few minutes to kill and wanted to make sure my skills weren't completely rusty. It's amazing how time consuming texture work can be.

In terms of the campaign itself, I worked on dialog for the second module. My least favorite part of writing dialog is the "getting to know you" phase, where introductions must be made and the character explains their place in the world. Still, I try to throw in a few tricks to make it interesting, so we'll hope for the best.

With luck, I'm getting a new power supply off a coworker this morning, so my computer woes might be better by tonight. This weekend probably won't be terribly productive as I've got both kids to myself as my wife goes off to the beach. I'll have to satisfy myself with dreams of virtual oceans.

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I slaved away over High Seas again, putting i...

March 02, 2006 by Adam in NWN2

I slaved away over High Seas again, putting in the boarding code and the start of a bounty system for sinking enemy ships. Of course, when I went home to test it, it ended up spawning in a tremendous number of crew, all of whom wanted to see my poor little PC dead. Fortunately my test character was able to mop the floor with them, being level 13 and all.

The big shock came this morning when I went to turn on my main computer and nothing happened. After a bit of fiddling, I decided the problem was with the power supply, so I've got to order one today. Deciding that fate was conspiring against me, I switched over to working on Raz's ghost ship model. The import flipped some of the normals over, so I carefully flipped them back. I then did some serious polygon reduction so that it wouldn't crash NWN and mostly got it into the prototype. I have some more fiddling to do, but hopefully it'll get in the game shortly.

In the meantime, I'm thinking of switching to other things while a power supply gets to me. A new team member has proposed some coding optimizations that I'd like to look at. There's dialog in the second module I need to update. I'd like to fiddle more with the ghost ship. No rest for the weary.

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Raz finished up the texture for the ghost shi...

March 01, 2006 by Adam in NWN2

Raz finished up the texture for the ghost ship, which is pretty amazing looking. I need to do some fiddling on my end to get it in the prototype, but can't wait to see it in combat. He's doing a whaling boat next, having finished up the UV map this morning. I think he's developed quite the talent for shipmaking over this last year.

I've been working on High Seas, as usual. Crew damage is in. Factions are in. You now have a captain's log that tracks your exploits. I fixed a number of bugs, such as getting a free shot with your weapons. When going to the world map, it now spawns an appropriate number of ships, rather than an endless horde that slowly takes over the ocean. I still have a bad AI navigation bug that I've been diligently ignoring. It's actually handy to have the ships move in a straight line while I do horrible things to it in the name of testing. If it tried to run away, I might have to actually plan my attack.

Today is all about setting up the boarding action. I'm reviewing ship deck tilesets and think I have a single option rather than building my own. Heed's Ship decks are okay, a bit abstract, but something that should function fine for a prototype. For the NWN2 version, I'm hoping we can make something a bit more flashy, perhaps incorporating the ship models we're putting together.

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I've won multiple awards for my Neverwinter Nights modules, which I've been working on since the year 2000. In the real world, I'm a web developer for a healthcare organization. If you have any questions, feel free to contact me.